Comments on: Adaptec’s RAID BIOS Sucks

By: Chad

Chad — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:48:35 +0000

I have used Supermicro Server boards with the Adaptec 2020SA and the 21610SA SATA controllers, they are not to be trusted at all ever, they lose drives, lose arrays and of course data.

3Ware ATA and SATA have been without issue and I have run the 3ware with sub par equipment (old used mixed drives), whereas the Adaptec has been run with topshelf gear in everyway except the adaptec controller. :-)

Adaptec SCSI works… forget their foray into the irreversible data erasure sata products. Only recommended for Enron, lawyers and the Gov.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:53:36 +0000

I have a similar problem with the same controller. RAID 5
The RAID gets corrupted pretty easily. Also, when I try to reinstall Windows, setup just hangs at random places. I also used Quit INIT. Setup makes it through most of the way then hangs 70-80% through.
I’m going to try to delete the RAID, change memory on the machine, and rebuild using the clear process.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 01:45:48 +0000

I’ve long since switched to LSI cards, but I’m starting to think RAID controllers are a problem altogether. Have you heard of the RAID-5 write hole? Or Sun’s ZFS and RAID-Z?

http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/raid_z

By: Gunner

Gunner — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:37:00 +0000

Guys, I work with Adaptec often. My customers consider them the best controllers for both ease of use (Adaptec Storage Manager) and hardware (speeds and feeds), very few cards are faster than Adaptec’s ARC (hardware based raid cards).

Sorry you’ve not been having the best of luck, but I think that their tech-support should be able to help. They know what they’re doing and should be able to help you. Also, as for running the “LOG”s…thats more so that you can email the log to their tech support..you don’t really need to interpret it yourself. Sometimes it will spit out a 16 digit code that only they can decipher. Good luck though.

By: Paul P.

Paul P. — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 18:54:13 +0000

I’ve been going round and round with this friggin controller of mine trying to do a very simple task - restore the other side of a degraded RAID 1 array. It’s one of the new SAS controllers, and I’m just running 2 new 15k SAS drives RAID 1 with brand new drives for the OS and 2 brand new SATA drives Raid 1 for bulk data storage.

Not sure how it got degraded in the first place, but I finally figured out how to rebuild it, as the ‘verify’ and ‘verify with fix’ options were grayed out within Adap Storage Mgr. The only thing that worked was using the bootable ASM CD which came with the controller. I have no idea why I couldn’t do this in the BIOS or the OS. The options weren’t there. The logical drive is now 75% rebuilt. I’ll post back if this actually works.

BTW, Adaptec is pretty tight with their software. You gotta have a Tech Support ID and register on their site to download.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 10:10:52 +0000

Hi Karl,

What is SMBE?

When you say “CLI” do you mean the bootable linux CD that came with the adapter? If I remember correctly, it didn’t work on my system.

It’s been a while since I’ve tried to remedy this issue, but I recall that just about the only interface I could actually use was the RAID BIOS.

-Mark

By: karl

karl — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 10:06:37 +0000

And you can verify a logical device by using the CLI.

CLI> open AAC0
CLI> container list
…
CLI> container scrub 1
…
CLI> close

would verify the second array…

regards karl

By: karl

karl — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:32:39 +0000

Hi,

in SMBE, you need to mark not a logical device but a single disk, then you can create a new task for a verify…

karl

By: mark++ » Blog Archive » New File Server

mark++ » Blog Archive » New File Server — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 07:42:41 +0000

[...] The LSI card is well supported by the megaraid2 Linux driver. The BIOS config stuff is leagues better than Crapdaptec’s. The drives are configured for RAID 5, which means one drive gets sacrificed to the parity gods (but the other 3 are all mine, baby). Check out the df -H: [...]

By: Suzanne

Suzanne — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 12:02:21 +0000

I have the same problem with SCSI RAID 5.

Now the problem is that in my Adaptec Storage Manager, there is no “New Task” tab ;-) I also can’t run ‘verify’ because it is grayed out. The only thing that I can run is ‘verify with fix’ and that’s what I have done but it didn’t solve the problem.

The status still didn’t change to OPTIMAL, it still says QUICK INIT. Actually the verify runs thorugh for many hours, and then comes up with the error message ”Verify failed: controller 1, logical device 1 (”system”) [0x00]“. The application also tells me to check the Adaptec Storage Manager Event log for further info, but there it simply says the same error message again without further information.

I’ve been using Adaptec RAID controllers for years, have several different SCSI and SATA controllers in our servers. Especially with the SATA I had nothing but trouble, they simply suck (sorry, I have no other words). And with the SCSI I am slowly understanding that Adaptec is not doing so great work with them after all. I even found a bug once that they then fixed with the next firmware release (optional battery module would simply not be recognized by their controller - it’s like they’ve never even tested it with a battery plugged in).

Would be great if someone from Adaptec would find this blog and shed some light on it!

Greetings from Hong Kong,
Suzanne